VERDICT
What would count as a verdict
A funder is entitled to know what would count as a verdict, decided before anyone has an interest in the answer. Each of the following conditions is a verdict, and not a setback to be managed.
- 1. Masters of recognised standing decline the terms, and the house can only be staffed by those who have no alternative.
- 2. More than half of the first intake of apprentices leaves within eighteen months for reasons other than completing the path.
- 3. The arbitration clause is never used, or is used and the outcome is ignored by the parties, which would make the internal settlement of disputes decorative.
- 4. The work does not sell outside the circle of those who already support the idea, or sells only as small objects to visitors rather than on commission.
- 5. The statutes have to be amended within three years to remove the right of exit, admission by application or the reciprocity clause, in order to keep the house standing.
The last weighs more than the others
If the safeguards proved incompatible with the working of the institution, then the institution should not be built, and knowing that would be worth the price of a house. It is the only one of the five conditions that concerns the thesis rather than the execution, and the only one whose outcome interests even those who have put no money into this project.
Why they are published
A list of failure criteria drawn up after the failure always fits the failure. Drawn up before and made public, it obliges those who run the project to answer on the facts instead of on their own perseverance, and gives funders a means of verification that does not depend on half-yearly reports.
The questions that remain open
Four questions remain deliberately open, and are set out here instead of being kept quiet, because a funder who discovered them later would be entitled to conclude that the rest too had been arranged for effect.
- — Whether a contractual institution without territory really belongs to the field of new legal orders, or is a different thing that borrows their vocabulary.
- — Where arrangements of this kind break in practice. The expectation of the writer is that they break at the moment a rafīq wishes to leave and the internal rules have quietly acquired more weight than the right of withdrawal.
- — Whether similar attempts exist in Europe, successful or failed. A failure that has already happened is worth more than any amount of planning.
- — Whether a federation whose only sanction is the withdrawal of recognition is stable at twenty houses, or whether such arrangements drift towards common ownership as they grow.